Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

A Summary of America's "Effort" In Iraq

Here is a bit from an opinion piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd that nails down the idiocy of US policy in Iraq:

You’d never know it, given Republicans’ churlish silence and unseemly sniping, but the president and the vice president have stumbled and bumbled their way to an acceptable ending to the war that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney so recklessly started. It was a magnificent miscalculation that Obama warned in 2002 was “a dumb war.”

Funnily enough, Obama has found it easier to wrap up Bush’s foreign policy blunders than his domestic ones.

Vice President Joseph Biden spent so many hundreds of hours hashing things out with Iraqi officials that he knew the names of their grandchildren — just as Bill Clinton could reel off street names during the peace effort in Northern Ireland.

In the painful calculation of what’s “good enough,” as we end our two attenuated wars, the White House sees it this way on Iraq: The baby is born. The gestation period couldn’t be 18 years; eight years was bad enough. The midwife had to leave.

The spectacular error that Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made was feeling we needed a post-9/11 demonstration of war to prove our toughness. If they had merely pushed along the Arab Spring, they could have saved a trillion dollars and the lives of 4,500 American troops.

It would have been more of a boon to our national security to finish off the Afghanistan mission and kill Osama bin Laden sooner. Instead, the Bush team let itself get distracted with nation-building in Iraq when our own nation was falling apart, and President Obama ended up surging and withdrawing in Afghanistan at the same time, which made no sense.

Before W. tried to outdo his daddy, we were a country that usually had to take a punch before we went to war. We didn’t unilaterally start wars.

In her new memoir, Condoleezza Rice has a sentence so stunningly lame it makes you want to scream — or cry. “The fact is,” she writes, “we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”

I’m not a National Security Council adviser, but I can think of about a hundred other options we had with Saddam.

At least Condi admits that one of the inflated and improvised rationales for war wasn’t true: “We did not go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to democratize Germany, though that became American policy once the Nazis were defeated.”

The real tragedy is that in 2008 Americans voted to change policies but got a Bush "lite" in Obama. Obama promised to get out of the war, stop torture, and get out of Guantanamo. Once in office he "surged" in Afghanistan and dragged his feet on all these commitments. He may have stopped torturing prisoners, but he has upped the ante with a lot more drone-based killings. Rather than arrest Osama Bin Laden he sent in a killer elite to "terminate" rather than capture. There is something indescribably sinister in a policy of death rather than justice.

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

This is an excellent speculative historical review of how debt, money, slavery, coinage, and government arose. It is chock-a-block full of obscure but interesting facts. The analysis is fresh and thought-provoking. I'm not in a position to assess the scientific validity of his reconstruction of ancient societies, but it rings true to me.

If you want a new perspective on how economic forces shape us and our societies, this is a "must read" book.

Here is just a tidbit from his chapter on the Axial Age (800 BC to 600 AD):

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance -- as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it -- but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else -- or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl -- it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athen's owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war -- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block -- the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then between the nobile Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal -- all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since -- can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? re they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

I heartily recommend that you read this book.

Update from the Front in the On-Going Computer War

Two years ago the US/Israel opened that latest offensive in the War of the Worlds that may be the Götterdämmerung of our civilization. They released the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons.

In the interim, China has used viruses and worms sneak into computers around the war probably in preparation for opening a new front in the Computer Wars.

Now there is a mysterious outbreak of a virus in the US's drone fleet. It isn't clear who has unleashed this new attack and what the intentions of the probe may be.

We are in the fog of war and in the opening stages of WWIII.

From Wired magazine:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Go read the whole article.

Most wars are fought with the bottom 90% of the population in a fog. We will be victims of this new war. We will have our economies wrecked, lives lost, and most of us won't even know there are battles going on, who is involved, and what kinds of devastation are being inflicted. We are like the serfs of the Middle Ages. Our feudal lords (the top 1% who control the government and military) are fielding armies that scourge the land and we know nothing about it until the armed columns descend upon our tiny village and put us all to the sword.

The Horror of War

Here is the first of 20 videos from a 2001 BBC production War of the Century. It focuses on the fight between Hitler and Stalin. It is very graphic. The producers wanted to focus on how vicious the fighting was, how both sides stooped to war crimes. It is a very ugly insight into how brutal people can be. Soldiers on both sides who participated in war crimes are asked if they felt they had committed a crime (they mostly say "no" or justify it by saying "it was long ago and a different time) and they are asked if they would do it again (a few say "yes" and many beat around the bushes). The video exposes the hatred that is still there:

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

America in Now Truly Orwell's Oceania

Obama has just signed an extension of the 9/11 "national emergency" for its 11th year. America is truly into the perpetual state of war that George Orwell foresaw as the organizing principle of the state:

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2011. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This is plain nutty. The US has now "fought" a war nearly three times as long as WWII against a ragtag enemy of a few hundred fanatics. This isn't a war. It is a police issue. The US has turned it into "nation building" and occupation of countries. The US has the look and feel of Orwell's 1984 where Oceania was constantly at war with Eurasia. Why? To maintain the grip of the state. There was no real war. It was ideological and it was the cover for a police state.

Earth to Obama: there will always be some kind of terrorism somewhere on earth. You can't "defeat" terrorism. You can only destroy specific groups and contain them or eliminate them. But that doesn't have to be presented as a "war". When the US went after Al Capone or Bonnie & Clyde or the Mafia, they didn't declare war. They beefed up police forces and went after them.

An Interesting Evaluation of US War Fighting

Here is an article in Wired Magazine by Spencer Ackerman that looks critically at Stanley McCrystal and sees the good and the bad. But the bottom line, he was effective, but managed to destroy his own career by bad mouthing the leadership above him. I'm sympathetic. I spent a career working for generally mediocre and incompetent people whose only real skill was bureaucratic jujitsu:

One of the greatest ironies of the 9/11 Era: while politicians, generals and journalists lined up to denounce al-Qaida as a brutal band of fanatics, one commander thought its organizational structure was kind of brilliant. He set to work rebuilding an obscure military entity into a lethal, agile, secretive and highly networked command — essentially, the United States’ very own al-Qaida. It became the most potent weapon the U.S. has against another terrorist attack.

That was the work of Stanley McChrystal. He is best known as the general who lost his command in Afghanistan after his staff shit-talked the Obama administration to Rolling Stone.

Inescapable as that public profile may be, it doesn’t begin to capture the impact he made on the military. McChrystal’s fingerprints are all over the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite force that eventually killed Osama bin Laden. As the war on terrorism evolves into a series of global shadow wars, JSOC and its partners — the network McChrystal painstakingly constructed — are the ones who wage it.

These days, McChrystal travels around the country to talk about his leadership style. His insights reveal a lot about how the JSOC became the Obama team’s go-to counterterrorism group. “In bitter, bloody fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” McChrystal has written, “it became clear to me and to many others that to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves.”

McChrystal’s career also reveals a second irony: At the moment of his greatest ascension, to overall command in Afghanistan, McChrystal couldn’t take his own advice.

...

McChrystal set to work, as he put it, building JSOC’s network. One key node: CIA. During a January speech, he recalled how he needed CIA’s help getting intelligence on a Taliban leader he was hunting. CIA was secretive, compartmentalized and suspicious of other organizations meddling in its affairs — exactly what JSOC used to be like.

So McChrystal took the rare step of going to CIA headquarters, hat in hand. As it turned out, CIA just needed a promise that JSOC “wouldn’t go across the border” into Pakistan, jeopardizing its own operations. McChrystal agreed, the intel flowed, and the Taliban commander was killed.

It was the beginning of a new relationship between JSOC and the vast spy apparatus the U.S. built after 9/11. CIA operatives and analysts would visit McChrystal’s base of operations in Balad, Iraq, to plan joint missions.

...

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave JSOC the authority to hold prisoners for 90 days before transferring them to military detention facilities. That gave JSOC jailers nearly limitless authority over their captives. Unsurprisingly, some began abusing it, beating prisoners senseless in a facility called Camp Nama — which Saddam Hussein used as a torture chamber — where the slogan was, “No Blood, No Foul.”

Although no public investigation has ever been conducted into the abuses at Nama, McChrystal reportedly said “This is how we lose,” when he toured the facility for the first time. He assigned his top intelligence officer, then-Brig. Gen. Michael Flynn, to professionalize JSOC interrogations. Flynn reached out to trained interrogators throughout the U.S. bureaucracy and even to around the world to provide instruction.

Subsequent interrogations of suspected al-Qaida captives in Iraq relied on Saudis brought in when a Saudi national was nabbed, Egyptians when an Egyptian was. Priest and Arkin report that detainees would even be videoconferenced in with their families — who’d plead with their sons to cooperate.
...

What was bureaucratically unthinkable before McChrystal is now routine: JSOC and CIA, matched with other government elements, now hunt al-Qaida worldwide in expanding, secretive wars.

Nor is that likely to change. McChrystal’s allies and proteges are all over the security bureaucracy. McRaven now runs all U.S. Special Operations Forces. Petraeus now runs the CIA. McChrystal’s fellow Army Ranger, Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, now runs JSOC. Flynn is the assistant director of national intelligence. Ten years after 9/11, al-Qaida’s network looks more brittle than ever, while JSOC’s is robust.

The network McChrystal built, McRaven enhanced and Votel inherits comes in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S. security bureaucracy, which Priest and Arkin call “Top Secret America” and which remains disconnected, bloated and expensive. Priest and Arkin bluntly conclude that McChrystal turned JSOC around “by outright rejecting at least four of Top Secret America’s defining characteristics: its enormous size, its counterproductive duplication, its internal secrecy, and its old-fashioned, hierarchical structure.”

What the post-9/11 reforms failed to accomplish across the sprawling national security apparatus, McChrystal did in miniature.

“We had to figure out a way to retain our traditional capabilities of professionalism, technology, and, when needed, overwhelming force,” McChrystal recalled in Foreign Policy, “while achieving levels of knowledge, speed, precision, and unity of effort that only a network could provide.”

Read the whole article. It is an interesting peek at the US military.

It is dangerous to look for "heroes" to pin events and history on. The real world is complex and many hands stir the pot. To think that one person is decisive is to kid yourself. The fact that McCrystal could break the key rule of "don't diss the boss" shows that he had feet of clay.

What the above story doesn't bring out is the level of leadership around McCrystal and the level of commitment and support from the troops below. A leader can't lead if the troops refuse to respond. Guys with big egos forget this small but critical fact. America is rife with the "big man" theory of everything. CEOs are paid exorbitant salaries because they supposedly "carry the corporation" on their shoulders. What a load of horse pucky.

The Truth about Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole is the most insightful observers of the Middle East. Here is a bit from a post by him on his blog Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.

All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.

...

Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.

Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.

...

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.

...

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.

Sadly, when Obama took office he had a mandate to reject the Bush policies. He had campaigned against them. But he quietly adopted them as his own. He sponsored his own "surge" in Afghanistan. He increased the drone attacks. He kept the secret prisons and Guantanamo but did tone down the official "torture policy" of the US.

I think the post by Juan Cole should be taken to heart. It is an upbeat message for Americans. It is a clarion call to take back their country by rejecting the Republicans and Obama.

Required Reading

Here is a bit from an ACLU report on America and the need to reclaim civil liberties:

Rather than working to allay public fear, our political leaders (with few exceptions) have manipulated it, to the point where it can be difficult to determine whether their expressions of alarm are genuine or merely opportunistic. Is it possible that many members of Congress actually believe that U.S. prisons are not secure enough to hold terrorism suspects? (And is it remotely conceivable that a member of Congress believes his own warning that if Khalid Sheikh Mohamed is brought to the United States for trial, he might be released on a technicality, granted asylum, and be on a path to citizenship?) These are arguments based on cynicism, not strength or resolve.

And that cynicism is emboldened by a political discourse that rewards those who inflate the terrorist threat and marginalizes those who accurately describe it. Thus, those who proclaim that Muslim terrorists represent an unprecedented threat to our way of life; that our existing laws, courts, and institutions—even our prisons—are inadequate in the face of this threat; that we have no choice but to dispense with core principles—including even the prohibition against torturing prisoners—to defeat this ruthless enemy; that, in short, “9/11 changed everything”—are extolled as hard-nosed realists, warriors who are willing to “take the gloves off.” By contrast, those who defend the vitality and viability of our constitutional system, who insist that our existing institutions are equal to the challenges posed by transnational terrorism; who demand that we abide by core principles, including fair trials for and humane treatment of prisoners, even if that means that terrorism suspects must be released and political leaders must be prosecuted; who, in short, do not believe that the threat of terrorism requires us to abandon our core principles—are dismissed as weak and naïve.

...

On May 26, 2011, a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to give President Obama—and all future presidents—more war authority than Congress gave to President Bush two days after the 9/11 attacks: under the House bill, a president would no longer have to show a connection to 9/11, or even any specific threat to America, before using military force anywhere in the world that a terrorism suspect may be found—including within the United States.
The House vote was a discordant spectacle because it sought to place the nation on a permanent war footing at a time when responsible policy-making called for the opposite.

This is must reading for Americans as they allow their civil liberties to be frittered away on endless "wars" against something that will never disappear "terrorism".

The actions of the US since 9/11 have been disreputable... except for the new policies of Obama in the Middle East, particularly in Libya, which have allowed these people to democratically fight for their rights against oppressive regimes.

Here is an article in Salon by Glenn Greenwald that discusses Obama's security state. He notes that the PBS program Frontline: Top Secret America discloses that Obama has continued Bush's obsession and tactics:

Here is one quote they include from Rizzo:

With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations. Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.

Frontline adds that while candidate Obama "promised a sweeping overhaul of the Bush administration’s war on terror" and "a top to bottom review of the threats we face and our abilities to confront them," Rizzo explains that, in fact, Obama officials during the transition made clear to the CIA that they intended almost complete continuity. And Rizzo was joined in this assessment today by Dick Cheney, who -- as recounted by his long-time faithful stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen -- cites this continuity to (once again) claim "vindication"; said the former Vice President, “[Obama] ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation.”

Pathetic. Obama promised "hope" and "change you can believe in" and "transparency" in government but he has delivered the economy over to the Wall Street bankers and the endless wars over to the Pentagon and has taken draconian steps against whistle-blowers.

How the UK Learned from its US Master

The world is well aware of the crimes of George Bush with his secret prisons and torture regime. But with the fall of Gaddafi, the UK is now getting its chance to shuck and jive in the public limelight and offer up excuses and the necessary exculpations for its behaviour. From an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Sami al-Saadi is considering whether to sue the British government after he and his family were 'rendered' in an operation between MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence services

A Libyan Islamist has told how he and his family were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation MI6 hatched in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence services. The rendition occurred shortly before Tony Blair paid his first visit to the dictator.

Sami al-Saadi, his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six, were flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli, where they were taken straight to prison. Saadi was interrogated under torture while his family were held in a nearby cell.

"They handcuffed me and my wife on the plane, my kids and wife were crying all the way," he told the Guardian. "It was a very bad situation. My wife and children were held for two months, and psychologically punished. The Libyans told me that the British were very happy."

Saadi says he is now considering whether to sue the British government, making him the second Libyan rendition victim to threaten legal proceedings in less than a week.

The evidence that the family were victims of a British-led rendition operation is contained in a secret CIA document found in the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, in Tripoli last week.

In London, meanwhile, an official inquiry into Britain's role in torture and rendition since 9/11 says the government has provided information about the UK's role in the affair, and Whitehall sources defended intelligence agencies' actions by saying they were following "ministerially authorised government policy".

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British intelligence agencies ran their own rendition operation, as opposed to co-operating with those that were mounted by the CIA.

Go read the whole article.

Democracy only works if government is transparent. When governments have secret armies, especially secret torture chambers, carrying out crimes on "behalf of the people" for which the people do not agree and are horrified to discover, then you don't have a legitimate government. Apparently this simple truth hasn't yet registered on the US or UK governments. You can't run secret "wars" and commit "secret crimes" on behalf of a democratic people if you don't tell them what you are up to and get their permission.

A Sensible Proposal

Here is a proposal from Thomas E. Ricks that makes sense to me:

Our nation's two most wrongheaded wars were launched by Texans. This is not a partisan crack -- LBJ was a Democrat, and George W. Bush a Republican. But it is a regionalist crack--the more I listen to Rick "Lynch Mob" Perry, the more I think we may need the following constitutional amendment:

"No citizen of the state of Texas may be eligible to serve as president of the United States until five decades have passed since the end of the last war waged by a president from Texas."

If only it were that easy. sadly, it is the American people who keep voting in idiots to lead them. You would think after the disaster of LBJ and his war, and the big lie of Nixon with his "secret plan" to end that war, and Reagan with his wild spending splurge based on voodoo economics, and George Bush with his wars of "choice", and now Obama who promises one thing running for office and delivers something else in office, that American voters would be jaundiced and savvy in their review of potential presidential candidates. But this year proves that they are ready to double down by electing a Mini-Me George Bush in Rick Perry. Incredible.

The Real Dick Cheney

Here is the start of a great article by Robert Scheer in The Nation:

Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue. The deceit of Dick Cheney is indeed of Shakespearean proportions, as evidenced in his new memoir. For the former vice president, lying comes so easily that one must assume he takes the pursuit of truth to be nothing more than a reckless indulgence.

Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader.

Not to mention that bin Laden was killed in his hiding place in Pakistan, a nation that the Bush administration had befriended after 9/11 by lifting the sanctions previously imposed in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a program connected with the proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how and the sale of nuclear material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Pakistan joined with only two other nations, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in granting diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government that provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda as bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 attack. But instead of focusing on the source of the problem, Cheney led the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had ruthlessly hounded any Al Qaeda operatives who dared function in Iraq.

You don’t have to slog too deeply through Dick Cheney’s advertisement for himself to grasp not only the wicked cynicism of the man but also how shallow are his perceptions.

You really should read the whole article.

It was telling for me when in a recent interview Dick Cheney couldn't honestly answer the question: "if waterboarding is not torture, then you would not mind if a nation like Iran took an innocent American, claimed they were spying, and waterboarded them 'to get information' about the spying". Cheney never answered the question. Instead he wanted to draw invisible distinctions saying that waterboarding by Iran is torture, but waterboarding done by the US is not, it is only "enhanced interrogation".

Dick Cheney is the Adolf Eichmann of the Bush administration, i.e. a "bureaucrat" who blandly pursued evil and vicious policies while believing that he was serving "a higher purpose".

Republican Mismanagement of the US Economy

What I find ludicrous is how the Republicans want to lecture the Democrats and Obama about "economics" and "budgets" and "deficits and debts".

Here is a bit from an article by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax “relief” for the wealthy.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.

So how big is "the tab" that Bush and the Republicans have run up for their "war of choice"?

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Right now you've got the Republicans saying that won't add $1 billion to FEMA to help the latest victims of a natural disaster "because America is broke". Funny... nobody noticed this "broke" problem in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, or 2008 when Bush and the Republians were spending taxpayers money like a drunken sailor.

What I can't believe is that voters in the US continue to believe the incredible nonsense spewed by the Republicans, especially by their outrageous presidential "candidates" who show abysmal knowledge of economics, of foreign affairs, of the Constitution, of American history, of the legislative process, and the pain & hurt among the unemployed, foreclosed, the retired and soon-to-retire who have lost their life savings, and the young who face a job market that will be closed to them for a decade. These bozos claim they can "run" America. Yeah... just like Bush ran America... right into the ground.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

That big political food fight last month in the US Congress is a sensational bit of theatre, but it misses the real problem with the US economy.

From the Washington's Blog:

Harvard’s Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ... with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion.

If the US wants to cut the deficit & debt, it needs to stop fighting wasteful, useless wars.

Instead of focusing on where their belly has been slit and the intestines are falling out, the US lawmakers made a huge racket over a paper cut on a finger. They bawled, they wailed. They shrieked enough to scare the world into a month-long plunge in the financial markets. But they were fighting over small potatoes. If the politicians were serious, they would look at the US military budget and at the insane amount of money they have spent doing "wars of choice" and "nation building" and other fruitless, stupid activities.

And while they had this shouting match over deficits and debts, the lawmakers have done nothing serious about the corruption and crime on Wall Street:

He concludes fraud is the heart of Wall Street. Under the poignant title, Goldman Sachs: Too Big to Obey the Law: “The behavior and de facto immunity of the biggest banks is out of control.” He cites the financial crisis was engineered by the largest banks to consolidate power: in 1995 the leading six banks had assets of 17% of US GDP; today they have 63%.

Wow! Who says crime doesn't pay? The Wall Street bankers sure know how to make crime pay and pay and pay. They have literally bilked the taxpayer out of billions and left the economy in a $10 trillion recession and yet nobody has been arrested and nobody is even under investigation!

America's Gift to the World

Americans like to think they bring peace and good government to the world. But as the following points out, they bring death, destruction, and the insistance on the payment of reparations from the victims of US violence.

Here is a post from Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon magazine:

Iraq foots the bill for its own destruction

By Murtaza Hussain

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.

Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s "free Iraq." In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to "liberate" the Iraqi people.

In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.

Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to "pay back" the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.

The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of "liberation" speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.

The invasion of Iraq was a war crime perpetrated under the false claim of "weapons of mass destruction". Bush, and now Obama, had unleashed a torrent of death and destruction on that nation. (From Wikipedia: Lancet estimated the civilian deaths in the range of 392,979-942,636).

To add insult to injury, the US is extracting "reparations" from Iraq?

Worse, the idea of "reparations" has an odious smell to it since it was the hated reparations imposed on Germany after WWI that led to WWII. Who in their right mind is imposing reparations on the victim nation of Iraq? The US is an outrageous barbarous country to first flatten the victim by belting him in the face, then pick his pockets while he is down with the demand that he pay up for "injuring my fist on your face". Nuts!

Time to Throw in the Towel

Here is an interesting interview with retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair. Until recently, he was in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.



The video is taken from a Wired article.

Denis Blair is bringing rationalism to "the war on terror". he is calling for a cost-benefit analysis. Sadly most Americans would say "if you can save one life, it is worth any amount of money". But that is nutty. Nobody has the infinite sums required to stop every death. People accept risk in all aspects of life. He mentions car accidents. Nobody is calling for the spending of billions and trillions to "stop the slaughter on the highways". Nobody thinks it is realistic to call for "not one more death from accidents on the highways".

The Endless War Against "Terrorism"

There is a good article by Karen Greenberg on TomDispatch.com. She looks at the killing of Osama bin Laden and realizes this isn't a turning point where the "war on terror" winds down. If anything, Obama is putting the war on steroids:

President Obama used the bin Laden moment to push through and sign into law a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, despite bipartisan resistance in Congress and the reservations of civil liberties groups. They had stalled its passage earlier in the year, hoping to curtail some of its particularly onerous sections, including the “lone wolf” provision that allows surveillance of non-US citizens in America, even if they have no ties to foreign powers, and the notorious Section 215, which grants the FBI authority to obtain library and business records in the name of national security.

One thing could not be doubted. The administration was visibly using the bin Laden moment to renew George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (even if without that moniker). And let’s not forget about the leaders of Congress, who promptly accelerated their efforts to ensure that the apparatus for the war that 9/11 started would never die. Congressman Howard McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was typical. On May 9th, he introduced legislation meant to embed in law the principle of indefinite detention without trial for suspected terrorists until “the end of hostilities.” What this would mean, in reality, is the perpetuation ad infinitum of that Bush-era creation, our prison complex at Guantanamo (not to speak of our second Guantanamo at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan).

In other words, Washington now seems to be engaged in a wholesale post-bin Laden ratification of business as usual, but this time on steroids.

...

Should the postmortem to bin Laden be just a continuation of the same-old-same-old? Shouldn’t there be a national pause for reflection as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches? Wouldn’t it make sense to stop and rethink policy in the light of his death and of a visibly tumultuous new moment in the Greater Middle East with its various uprisings and brewing civil wars?

...

At present, Congress is considering an expansion of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that it passed on September 14, 2001, and that allowed “the use of force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the attacks of 9/11. The current version builds upon the previous open-ended war model and actually expands the number of possible targets for the use of force to those who “have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization or person” that is engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.

Nor does it have an end date. How long this overly broad, overly vague policy would remain in effect remains unknown. It would be far better if current and pending revisions of the AUMF were more honest in acknowledging that the counterterrorism policy it promotes is slated to last indefinitely, much like the “wars” on drugs and organized crime.

Bush's (and now Obama's) "war on terrorism" is a surreal incarnation of the endless war in Orwell's 1984:

Nineteen Eighty-Four (mostly written 1984) is a 1948 dystopian fiction written by George Orwell about a society ruled by an oligarchical dictatorship. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control.

Orwell wrote that mostly as a warning about the cold war and it was a broad caricature of Stalinist Russia, but it reads almost like a playbook for 21st century America.

The Fumbling Incompetence of Obama

Here is an excellent interview by Keith Olbermann with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. The video starts with a gaff by Obama's new Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who simply gets wrong the "reason" for invading Iraq.

At 1:50 the video mentions the outrageously brutal treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning comes up in the discussion with Wilkerson at 4:15 in the video. Wilkerson's position: "the treatment of Bradley Manning is unconscionable".

At 2:05 the video begins the interview with Wilkerson:



All of this shows that Obama is a continuous of Bush policies despite running an anti-war campaign with a promise to end the war in Iraq, close down Guantanamo, and generally stop the excesses of Bush's "war on terrorism". Sadly, Obama has ratcheted the war up, not down.

Obama sold himself to the electorate as anti-war and as a more moral and honourable person than Bush, but he has shown himself to be as indifferent to rights or the limits of the law as Bush in his most extreme positions. The press doesn't explore this, but this is incredible. See 6:00 into the video where Wilkerson is upset that the Justice Department refuses to investigate the 2008 financial collapse and the on-going torture treatment of detainees.

Trimming US Military "Fat"

Nobody is talking about it, but given all the intense discussion of deficits, it is surprising that there isn't more talk about cutting military spending in the US. From a study by the Center for American Progress:

As the Obama administration and Congress try to agree on a deal to raise the debt limit—an agreement that will inevitably involve cutting some money from the budget—they should keep in mind that they can cut $100 billion in defense spending annually and still keep our military budget at the Reagan administration’s peak Cold War levels of approximately $580 billion (all numbers adjusted for inflation unless otherwise noted). Bringing the defense budget down to the levels that existed under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, H.W. Bush, and Clinton would require reductions of $250 billion to $300 billion annually.

The question currently facing Congress and President Barack Obama—how much to spend on defense in times of large deficits or in the final years of a war—is not new. In fact, the graph below shows that a number of presidents from both parties carried out significant reductions in the defense budget under similar circumstances since the end of World War II.

Click to Enlarge
The report identifies specific items to cut. It ends with the following hope:

Defense spending helped create the fiscal crisis facing our nation today, and defense cuts must be part of the solution. The president and Congress can continue a bipartisan tradition of restoring defense spending to sustainable, responsible levels as the United States winds down its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the US spends as much as the rest of the world combined on its military, there should be plenty of room for cutbacks.